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KDE Security Advisory: Temporary Directory Vulnerability
Original Release Date: 2004-08-11
URL: http://www.kde.org/info/security/advisory-20040811-1.txt
0. References
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2004-0689
1. Systems affected:
All versions of KDE up to KDE 3.2.3 inclusive.
2. Overview:
The SUSE security team was alerted that in some cases the
integrity of symlinks used by KDE are not ensured and that
these symlinks can be pointing to stale locations. This can
be abused by a local attacker to create or truncate arbitrary
files or to prevent KDE applications from functioning
correctly (Denial of Service).
KDE creates in ~/.kde symlinks to a temporary directory, a socket
directory and a cache directory. When a user logs into the KDE
environment the startkde script ensures that these symlinks are
present and point to directories that are owned by the user.
However, when a user runs KDE applications outside the KDE
environment or when a user runs a KDE applications as another user,
such as root, the integrity of these symlinks is not checked and it
is possible that a previously created but now stale symlinks exist.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org)
has assigned the name CAN-2004-0689 to this issue.
3. Impact:
When a stale symlink is present a local attacker could create the
directory that the symlink is pointing to with his own credentials
to prevent access to this directory by KDE applications. This can
prevent KDE applications from functioning correctly.
When a stale symlink is present a local attacker could create the
directory that the symlink is pointing to with his own credentials.
Since KDE applications will attempt to create files with certain
known names in this directory, an attacker can abuse this to overwrite
arbitrary files with the privileges of the user.
4. Solution:
Source code patches have been made available which fix these
vulnerabilities. Contact your OS vendor / binary package provider
for information about how to obtain updated binary packages.
5. Patch:
Patches for KDE 3.0.5b are available from
ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/security_patches :
da950a651e69cd810019efce284120fc post-3.0.5b-kdelibs-kstandarddirs.patch
Patches for KDE 3.1.5 are available from
ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/security_patches :
c97ab0cf014adb59e315047210316f5d post-3.1.5-kdelibs-kstandarddirs.patch
Patches for KDE 3.2.3 are available from
ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/security_patches :
345ce2e01cfdfa4754c47894c0271dcc post-3.2.3-kdelibs-kstandarddirs.patch
6. Time line and credits:
23/06/2004 SUSE Security Team alerted by Andrew Tuitt
26/06/2004 Patches created
27/07/2004 Vendors notified
11/08/2004 Public advisory
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